Explaining Viewers’ Emotional, Instrumental, and Financial Support Provision for Live Streamers

On live streams, viewers can support streamers through various methods ranging from well-wishing text messages to money. In this study (N=230) we surveyed viewers who had given money to a streamer. We identified six motivations for why they gave money to their favorite live streamer. We then examined how factors related to viewer, streamer, and viewer-streamer interaction were associated with three forms of social support provision: emotional, instrumental, and financial support. Our main findings are: parasocial relationship was consistently correlated with all three types of social support, while social presence was only related with instrumental and financial support; interpersonal attractiveness was associated with emotional and instrumental support and lonely people were more likely to give instrumental support. Our focus on various types of social support in a live streaming masspersonal platform adds a more detailed understanding to the existing literature of mediated social support. Furthermore, it suggests potential directions for designing more supportive and interactive live streaming platforms.